Thursday, December 27, 2007

Another scarf for 2007. This particular neck warmer was a Christmas surprise for Hubs. Well, a sort of surprise. He picked out the yarn (Filatura Di Crosa 127 Print) back in October, but given my average knitting speed, I don't think he expected to see it for another few years or more.

He was almost right. Once he picked out the yarn, I started thinking about patterns that would show off the print. I wanted to do something very simple and I sketched out ideas for rib variations that, had they materialized, would have looked lovely. By the time I had a collection of patterns to try, it was way too late to try any of them.

Finally, with five days to go before Christmas, I decided to toss it all and resort to my old faithful: mistake rib. The fabric that results from mistake rib is worth all the tedium of creating it, if you ask me. It's a fun stitch that looks a lot more complicated than it is. It has more texture than standard rib and isn't as squishy. All in all, great fast scarf stitch. And, for this particular yarn, it has the added bonus of letting the print do all the work. The stitching is basic, but the print gives it some pizazz.

As for the surprise, it went very well. Hubs never saw me knitting the scarf, which was the biggest challenge. Usually I pull out the knitting while we're watching tv or driving, and so I gave up many great knitting ops to get this done. I ended up spending nearly three days knitting. (But given that those three days were spent catching up with season 1 of Heroes, I guess I can't complain.) The surprise factor was really what made the gift and it was totally worth all the knitting for that.